If you’ve never experienced San Francisco Pride, you’re truly missing out. Whether you are gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual or transgender, everyone is welcome, accepted and embraced. Simply put, it’s a place for people to be themselves regardless of their lifestyle choices and celebrate who they are without criticism, shame or guilt. It’s a truly liberating experience for all.

Since its modest beginnings, San Francisco Pride has ballooned into one of the largest and most well-known Pride events in the world. Pride events everywhere have come to symbolize several things: the long history of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer resistance to the gender and sex binaries and the hegemony of heterosexist institutions, the freedom of all people to meaningfully and proudly express their sexual and gender identities, and the commitment of LGBT people to combating oppression. From this history of rebellion grew the mission of San Francisco LGBT Pride: to educate the World, celebrate our culture, commemorate our heritage, and liberate our people.

This year marked the 39th anniversary of the San Francisco Pride Celebration and Parade. This year’s theme was “In Order to Form a More Perfect Union…” The event was held over the weekend of June 27 and 28, 2009. With over 200 parade contingents, 300 exhibitors, and more than a dozen community-run stages and venues, the San Francisco Pride Celebration and Parade is the largest gathering of LGBT people and allies in the nation. The two-day celebration is free and open to all and has drawn crowds up to 1.2 million people in a single weekend.

Just going to Pride is an experience in itself. This year however, I was fortunate enough to actually march in the parade on behalf of PETA and Bay Area Vegetarians! Bay Area Vegetarians are a local group that offers free vegetarian info, support and recipes throughout the Bay Area and beyond with over 4,000 members.

This year they had volunteers wearing lettuce bikinis to show off their healthy veggie bodies (yours truly included), nurses handing out “prescriptions” to Go Veg to avoid heart disease and obesity and people in animal costumes to represent all the animals who don’t want to end up in a slaughterhouse.

I can’t even begin to explain the feeling of parading around in a bikini in front of a half a million people and handing out leaflets. The press was snapping photo’s left and right , people of all ages, races and sexes were shouting and hungrily grabbing for stickers and vegetarian starter kits. It was incredible!

10 blocks later, when all was said and done, roughly 18 thousand pieces of literature had been distributed. Just to be conservative, lets say that half were discarded without being read leaving an estimated 9,000 people that actually did read what they were handed. PETA did a survey and found out that 45% of people who read the vegetarian starter kits go veg! 45% of 9,000 is 4,050. If we were conservative AGAIN, we could cut that in half and still have 2,000 new vegetarians just from the parade. That doesn’t count all the people the new vegetarians will reach out to and change, all the roommates who read the VSK left lying on the coffee table, etc.

Overall, I think Pride proved to be a successful weekend for those in the veggie world and for so many other people who put effort into spreading their message. The bottom line is that Pride is about equality. I think that once people can grasp that among human beings, it gives the animals that much more of a chance.